Hands-On: Learn Linux

Navigating the Linux environment is a fundamental requirement for most software engineers, but relying on copied commands often leaves you stuck when a service fails or a script breaks. This course is a comprehensive guide to operating and automating Linux, built up through hands-on practice. You will start with the core mechanics of the shell, output and error redirection, and filesystem navigation, before moving into file manipulation, pattern expansion, and terminal-based editing. From there, we cover identity and security, explaining exactly how users, groups, root, and sudo interact with file permissions and creation defaults. Once the foundation is set, you will manipulate data directly from the command line using text processing tools like grep, sed, and awk, connecting commands with pipes to filter, sort, deduplicate, and transform delimited fields. You will also learn how to search for files by name and metadata, and how to safely execute commands against those search results across directories.

With the fundamentals in place, the course shifts to system operation and infrastructure. You will inspect running processes through the proc filesystem, control shell jobs, send signals, and keep work running in the background while capturing output. We then examine packages and services, showing you how to install from an offline repository, query service logs, and repair a failed service. You will also get hands-on with storage by measuring disk use, partitioning a scratch disk, creating and mounting a filesystem, and configuring a persistent mount. After covering archiving and compression with tar and zip, you will automate tasks by scheduling cron jobs and systemd timers. Finally, everything comes together in a dedicated Bash scripting module where you will deliberately quote variables, handle arguments and exit statuses, read interactive input, and write branching logic. The course concludes with applied operations, where you will use your new skills to build a log-health report, schedule a verified backup, and recover a broken reporting service.